Craig James Ostler: In 1813 the Smith family moved from West Lebanon, New Hampshire, a few miles away to Norwich, Vermont.[1] This house and the surrounding farm have been identified as the most likely place for the Smith’s home.[2] At the time, the seven-year-old Joseph Jr. walked with crutches from the surgery that removed bones from his left leg earlier that year. On March 25, 1816, Joseph and Lucy welcomed into the family their eighth child, a boy they named Don Carlos.[3]
Susan Easton Black: In Norwich, Vermont, Lucy Smith writes that their financial tensions began to ease. In other words, for the first time she sees a way out of the poverty that the family has struggled even to get the necessities of life. But, then she describes the first year they had a crop failure, which crop failures, if you are a farmer by trade—that is the worst. She then says our second year in Norwich—crop failure again. And by the third year she tells of her husband now being decided to quit Vermont.[4]
Craig James Ostler: The previous eruption of Mount Tambora near Java, expelled volcanic ash and debris that shaded the sun’s rays in the year 1815, known as “the year without summer.”[5]
Susan Easton Black: For all the debris that came up from that explosion, eventually it is hitting the eastern United States, especially in the year 1816. Once it hits the U.S you have farmers all on the eastern seaboard that are going, “That’s it, I am done.” Notice that Joseph Smith, Sr., is not the only one by the year 1816 that wants to get out of Vermont.
Spencer Fluhman: The Smiths, their migration or exodus out of New England reflected the experience of a great many of kind of northern folks in the United States. All of these folks were much more mobile than their parents and grandparents had been. They moved more often in the period of the Smith’s family’s coming of age and they were a part of a large generation of folks, who are establishing new communities.
Susan Easton Black: Over 60,000 inhabitants from the state of Vermont are on the move. Most of them are heading to a place called western New York.
Craig James Ostler: This final crop failure was more than the Smith family could handle, and along with other factors, caused them to leave Vermont and settle instead in Palmyra, New York, where only a few years later Joseph was to receive a series of remarkable visions and receive the Book of Mormon plates.[6]
These are for copying so that you don’t need to change all the numbers.
1 Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir, ed. Lavina Fielding Anderson, (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), 311.
2 Larry E. Dahl, “Vermont,” Sacred Places: New England and Eastern Canada, ed. LaMar C. Berrett, (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1999), 94-96.
3 Lucy’s Book, 266, 865.
4 Of their stay in Norwich Lucy reported, “My husband now determined to change his residence. Accordingly, we moved to Norwich in Vermont and established ourselves on a farm belonging to Squire Murdock. The first year our crops failed and we bought our bread with the proceeds of the orchard and our own industry. The second year they failed again. In the ensuing spring Mr. Smith said that he would plant once more on this farm and if he did not succeed better, he would go to New York, where the farmers raised wheat in abundance. This year was like the preceding seasons; vegetation was blighted by untimely frost, which well nigh produced a famine.” (Lucy’s Book, 311. Spelling and punctuation standardized).
5 “Year Without Summer: Effects Of Tambora Volcanic Eruption On Iberian Peninsula Studied For First Time,” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225161422.htm
6 Peter K. Bellville, “A Year Without A Summer,” Ensign, January 1983, 65.
